MONTREAL — Maria Clara Escobar didn’t know what she was getting herself into when she travelled from São Paulo, Brazil, to Portugal to visit her father. But she was ready for anything.

She brought along a video camera, borrowed from a friend, and braced herself for the possibility that she might be sent packing on arrival.

“I thought the conflict would be more direct,” Escobar said, “that in that first moment, he would tell me to go away. I didn’t know that the relationship would (develop) with the passing of days. I didn’t know that I would film so much, that my way of looking at him would change, and that you would see it by watching me looking at him.”

Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Escobar had been close to her father until the age of 6. After her parents split, their interactions became more infrequent. In her teens, their relationship took on an intellectual aspect: He brought her to the cinema, they exchanged books and wrote to each other frequently. But with the years, they became more distant.

After graduating from film school in Rio, Escobar moved to São Paulo, where she has lived for seven years, writing scripts, making a couple of short films and helping other directors on their projects.

The idea of filming her father came not only as a way of reclaiming their past together, but of broaching a traumatic point in her country’s history — the torture and disappearances under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s.

“I didn’t want to find the historical truth,” she said.

“I was trying to listen to him, to have whatever he told me be the truth. I wanted to discover something.”

The result is Os Dias Com Ele, a fascinating documentary consisting of a series of simply framed interviews with her father, in which the former activist and playwright circles questions about Brazil’s violent past, including his torture at the hands of the military, and its implications on the present.

The difficulties he — and as a result, his daughter — has in getting to the point is indicative of his country’s discomfort in talking about what took place.

Escobar was forced to return to Brazil when she ran out of money, midway through the shooting process; but funding from a new federal program allowed her to fly back to Portugal and finish what she started.

Os Dias Com Ele is one of six Brazilian features presented at the Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC), five of them by first-time directors, indicative of a new generation of filmmakers finding novel ways to look at the world around them. The festival’s spotlight also includes 10 Brazilian shorts and a four-part series on Brazilian music by French director Vincent Moon.

“I think 2013 was one of the most interesting of the last few years,” said Pedro Butcher, a Rio-based film critic for the Folha São Paulo newspaper, whom the FNC has invited to present several screenings.

“We had a very strong Brazilian film production and distribution system in the last years of the dictatorship. The military government created Embrafilme, a company that supported and produced Brazilian films and distributed them nationally. It was quite successful. … It was a very complex situation but the fact is, it was a very positive moment for Brazilian cinema.”

Brazil’s first elected president, Fernando Collor de Mello, shut down Embrafilme and the like-minded Concise, leading to a film drought that began in the early ’90s and lasted more than a decade. Signs of life emerged in 2003, thanks to tax deduction programs related to film production and, in 2006, the Agência Nacional do Cinema, Butcher explained.

“At first, it created all these Brazilian blockbusters, comedies that don’t travel (outside the country). But in the last five or six years, a new generation has appeared, of people making films totally in the margins.”

Michael Wahrmann fits the description. The Uruguay-born director grew up in Israel before coming to Brazil on an exchange program in 2004, graduating from São Paulo’s FAAP film school in 2007. His debut feature, Avanti Popolo, mixes fiction and documentary styles, favouring a static camera in slow-paced scenes of an elderly father (played by Brazilian director Carlos Reichenbach, who died in 2012) and his grown son (incarnated by Wahrmann’s old film prof, André Gatti) butting heads as the latter uncovers a stack of Super 8 films made by his late brother, who disappeared decades before.

“It’s a film about a never-ending wait — the claustrophobic, paralyzed past of these characters,” Wahrmann said. “I thought the best way to shoot it was to let the camera play a dramatic role in the action. They are paralyzed, and so are we. I join the director and spectator; we sit in the same place, observing these people and letting them be, in their hard relationship, almost without interference.”

For Wahrmann, as for Escobar, it all comes back to the scars of life under the military dictatorship — a reality to which, even though he is not Brazilian by birth, Wahrmann can relate.

“For me, the film is about the present, and how the past has such a big influence on our day-to-day actions,” he said. “I have been dealing with these questions since I was in early high school in Israel, and began having my first obsessions with Holocaust stories.”

Though far from a commercial release, Avanti Popolo has found success on the festival circuit, winning best film of the Rome Film Festival’s CinemaXXI section (from a jury headed by Larry Clark) and screening at fests in Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Marseille and Vienna. Our interview took place by email this week, while Wahrmann was at the Hamburg Film Festival.

The director expressed enthusiasm to be part of the Brazilian spotlight at the FNC, but hesitated to define the changes taking place in the country’s film scene.

“It’s difficult to call it a movement,” he said, “but there is a new group of young filmmakers who are putting themselves a bit apart or parallel to the established film industry and searching for new (ways to express) their anxieties.”

A standout on the FNC program is Caetano Gotardo’s O Que se Move (The Moving Creatures), an evocative three-part drama looking at families dealing with loss. Minimal, often surreal dialogue combines with drifting camerawork and understated musical numbers for an idiosyncratic exploration of life-changing incidents and repressed emotions.

Marcos Pimentel takes an equally esoteric approach to his existential documentary Sopro (Breath), an almost wordless portrait of a rural community, from kids playing to a cow giving birth, a trapped pig, an old woman on her deathbed and the steady unfolding of time that connects them all.

In Domestica (Housemaids), documentary director Gabriel Mascaro gave video cameras to teenagers and asked them to film their nannies. Though it grows repetitive, the film deconstructs a common middle-class family practice while giving these overlooked women (and one man) a voice, and revealing the complex dynamics and generational connections between them and their employers.

The past is haunting in Clarissa Campolina and Helvécio Marins Jr.’s Girimunho, in which an elderly widow tries to come to terms with the recent death of her husband. Showing non-professional actors in their actual homes, the film alternates between gritty reality and colourful fantasy. Festival appearances have included Rotterdam, Venice, Edinburgh, Havana and Nantes, where it won two awards.

While happy to see festivals finally opening up to Brazil, Butcher notes that it’s an ongoing process which involves changing preconceptions.

“Many festivals expect something from Brazilian cinema — urban violence, because of (Fernando Meirelles’s 2002 hit) City of God,” he said. “But these young filmmakers are trying to show urban life or country life in a more realistic way. They’re not so much into genre or action films. They try to see the country in a more poetic way.”

In doing so, Escobar, Wahrmann and their peers are developing their own cinematic language. Rooted in the past, feet firmly planted in the present, they embody a vibrant future for film in Brazil.

The Festival du nouveau cinéma runs Wednesday to Oct. 20. The above-noted Brazilian films are part of the fest’s Panorama section. For tickets and information, visit nouveaucinema.ca.

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.